On Semantic Interoperability of Model-based Definition of Product Design

摘要

Fundamentally, the engineering designs are collections of information, which contain the structural, qualitative and the behavioral (kinematic and static) specifications of some physical products that satisfy some customer requirements. Vast suits of information exchange standards, most notably ISO10303 (STEP), are currently being used for capturing product design in manufacturing industries. In recent years, a modern practice of capturing the product design information using model-based definition (MBD) (STEP AP242, ASME Y14.5) is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to capture geometrical dimension and tolerances (GD&T) against managed models of 3D design features instead of traditional 2D drafting, facilitating communication of the design intents, and product model information (PMI). However, MBD suffers from difficulties in standardization of managed models due to diversity of views, stemming from cultural and traditional differences among the product designers and organizations. In the wake of semantic web technologies, researchers proposed number of semantic models for capturing product design concepts based on ontological taxonomy and rules, aiming to integrate heterogeneous sources of data based on contextual meaning of the information. In this article, we present an upper level ontology for capturing MBD based product designs, including axiomatic definitions of concepts related to product design (e.g. part, topology, feature, dimension, and tolerance). The primary goal of such semantic model is to increase the interoperability of MBD based product design and integrate domain-specific design features from manufacturability perspective (CNC, sheet metal, molding, 3D printing). In order to achieve such cross-domain interoperability, we based our design on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The applicability of the proposed ontology is elucidated by presenting usage pattern based on example design.